The information on this web site supplements our three books on Dr. Mudd by providing file downloads, video, audio, and other information that cannot be included in printed books. The books are:

During the latter part of the American Civil War (1861-1865) the young actor John Wilkes Booth conceived a plan to kidnap President Abraham Lincoln and carry him to Richmond, Virginia. He believed the Union Government would release a large number of captured Confederate soldiers in order to secure the release of the President. Booth recruited a small number of coconspirators to help him, but the group was never able to execute Booth’s impractical plan. When Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his army in early April 1865, Booth realized the war was over. Frustrated and angry, he decided to assassinate the President, and did so at Washington’s Ford’s Theater on Good Friday evening, April 14, 1865.

Booth fled the theater and rode quickly out of Washington across a bridge into Maryland, meeting up with an accomplice, David Herold. However, Booth had broken a small bone in his left leg , either when jumping to the theater stage after shooting Lincoln, or from his horse falling on the muddy road. As the two men rode hard away from Washington, the pain in Booth's leg increased. He had intended to ride down the eastern shore of the Potomac and then cross the river by boat to Virginia, but he felt he needed medical help, so he turned inland and headed for the farm of a doctor he knew, Dr. Samuel A. Mudd. The two men arrived at the Mudd farm just before dawn. Dr. Mudd set Booth's broken leg and allowed him to rest in an upstairs bedroom. Booth and Herold left the Mudd farm later that day around sunset. A week and a half later, Union soldiers cornered them in Virginia. Herold was captured. Booth was killed.

Many people were arrested during the Government’s investigation of the assassination, but ultimately only eight of these, including Dr. Mudd, were put on trial by a Military Commission. All eight were found guilty. The four whom the military commission believed had actually helped plan and participate in the assassination were executed. The other four, including Dr. Mudd, were sent to Fort Jefferson, a military prison located on a small Gulf of Mexico island about 70 miles west of Key West, Florida.

President Andrew Johnson pardoned Dr. Mudd in 1869 in part because of his work during an 1867 yellow fever epidemic at Fort Jefferson. The epidemic lasted three months, from August 18th to November 14th. The fort’s physician, Dr. J. Sim Smith, was one of the first to die. Dr. Mudd and a civilian physician at Key West, Dr. Daniel Whitehurst, agreed to take his place for the duration of the epidemic. Three hundred thirteen soldiers, 54 prisoners, and 20 civilians, a total of 387 people, were at the fort during the epidemic. Two hundred seventy of them contracted yellow fever. Thirty-eight died. Many of the survivors credited Dr. Mudd with their recovery. Towards the end of the epidemic, Dr. Mudd himself contracted yellow fever and almost died. When the epidemic had finally run its course, the surviving soldiers at Fort Jefferson signed a petition asking President Johnson to pardon Dr. Mudd for his service during the epidemic. The petition said in part:

He inspired the hopeless with courage, and by his constant presence in the midst of danger and infection, regardless of his own life, tranquilized the fearful and desponding.

After returning home in 1869, Dr. Mudd resumed his medical practice and worked at restoring his farm, which had fallen into disrepair while he was in prison. He lived for fourteen more years, until 1883, when he died of pneumonia at the age of 49. Dr. Mudd's wife Sarah Frances Mudd died in 1911.